CIBSE President's Blog

October is the month for everything… October is a big month in the Presidential Calendar: joining ASHRAE and IMechE for Graduate of the Year Competition , opening the CIBSE Conference at Olympia, hosting the President’s Awards Dinner, dropping in on the Worshipful Company of Fan makers (as you do) and attending the Construction Industry Council . Meanwhile both my first and second year Masters students arrived on campus to systems engineer. Prestidigitation became Presidigitation. Thank heavens for Construction Advisers The CIBSE Conference opened alongside the Building Services exhibition on a bright autumn morning at Olympia. After a quick ‘ let’s keep it simple’ from yours truly, Paul Morrell, the outgoing Government Construction Adviser gave us his wise 40Mb PowerPoint take on the industry. CIBSE gave him an Armada Cup at my Awards Dinner a little later in the week at the Royal Society. In years of turmoil when Parliament often seemed little more than a rehearsal for th...

Of the historic events fighting to get into this month’s Presidential Blog - CIBSE September Board, Ofgem Board, Start of Term - all pale into insignificance against the Amazing: the launch of iPhone5 . Otherwise it’s back to work in North Korea and a tolerant CIBSE Board suffers a grumpy President. iPhone5 first. Its only snag (aside from the new connector and Maps App placing my house in the next street!) is that you still can’t remove the cement that was once on your fingers and now on the retina screen. Yet again iPhone isn’t the contractor’s phone of choice. What a massive global market to miss! I’ve still got an old Nokia with a sealed rubber keyboard ( YEN members may need to look ‘keyboard’ up on your iPad) that you could throw into a bucket of plaster with impunity. In that big fat CIRIA book ‘Barriers to Innovation in the Construction Industry’ the thinnest chapter must be ‘Barriers to Using the Mobile Phone’. Before it was invented, how did we ever give clients the...

Another historic blog... First the Rio+20 Conference , last month plumbers discover the Higgs Boson .   This month the most unsustainable Olympics ever...? Blogs record what your President does – and for a fortnight I did nothing but sit and cheer and occasionally eat McDonald’s.   For fourteen days no one mentioned ‘iconic’, ‘sustainable’, ‘innovative’, and certainly not ‘affordable’.   Instead it was faster, heavier, further – measurable and real - a brilliant celebration of what it is like to be normal , focussed and to deliver.   This year’s President’s Prize for Normal Engineering goes to the Boardman bikes. I can now reveal, as a Presidential exclusive, how Lord Coe won those few extra medals beyond wildest expectations, through a brilliant three phase tactical feint of D-Day proportions.   You will only read it here. First phase - unleash the London Creatives at the very beginning. Remember the logo that looked like a cow-pat , a mascot t...

Another historic blog.... Last month Rio+20 Conference , this month we, the international fraternity of plumbers, discovered the Higgs Boson (well probably), and maybe are getting design conditions wrong? Two things spoilt the momentous event in plumbing history. The first was so much media material suggesting scientists had built the supercollider.  As far as I can see they just did some programming. The second was the sight and sound of some very distinguished science journalists explaining why our engineering triumph was in any way important to keeping civilisation going. Some explanations were blatantly dishonest, comparing discovering the Higgs Boson with discovering the electron. The difference of course is that no one had a clue what made up cathode rays in 1899.  In contrast, within normal engineering certainty we knew that the Higgs was there anyway.  So physicists’ Standard Model (of something) that had been taught for twenty years was now 100% OK – an increase...

As I noted in my Presidential Address , the ‘Rio+20’ sustainable development summit would be on my patch. Well it took place, squeezed between the Queen’s Jubilee, a G20 Summit and Euro2012. Not much, of course, happened. Bloomberg tells me ‘clean energy’ stocks dropped by 3% out of sentiment. But having once been involved in all this I should say something in its defence. That nothing happened was the point. ‘Rio+X’ has become an enormous trade show for the Corporate Responsibility Industry. We can hardly complain - we will have our trade show this October. But the original ‘UN Rio’ wrote so many over ambitious agendas because frankly there was not much else going on at the time. International quiescence is hardly how you would describe 2012. That, in the current global chaos, world leaders did reaffirm sets of intentions that they have not all delivered is still a relief. Of course it was a big opportunity missed etc. etc. and it further deflates the currency of ‘sustainable developm...

End of first month as CIBSE President! One AGM (thanks to all of you who emailed me thanking me for the Presidential address), one Board Away Day, one Board and a lot of extra emails. But what, asked a member of YEN after the AGM at Imperial, do you Presidents actually do?  The truth is that it is the President-Elect who has all the fun. When you are President-Elect you can say what you like, and you still get invited to lunch just in case you were going to do what you said. The President, weighed down by the Presidential gong, needs to focus on summing up wise Board decisions, and keeping an eye on the house keeping.   So what did we decide... As our first Board action Andy Ford has been sent off to set up a panel to look at diversity within our membership and industry.  Hard on his heals was the Report of the Government’s Panel on Fair Access to the Professions.  To me it is not a rather superficial report, not least because it bundles quite different ‘profession...